Although you may
already have a requirement to comply with the Privacy Act you need to be
particularly aware of the changes as you will need to change your privacy
policies and practices significantly in order to comply with requirements of
the Australian Privacy Amendment Act 2012.

A point to note

Each State has
its own Privacy legislation and therefore you must understand the legislative
restrictions on processing personal data, not only within the State you reside,
but of the States you interact with!

Friday, 7 March 2014

In October 2013 I wrote a blog entitled Stone Aged
Security, where I noted that we've been through the journey of Stone Age to
Industrial Age twice before, first for civilisation taking 12,000 years, and
then again for IT, but this time 200x faster and only taking 60 years, and that
we had started the cycle again for the Social Stone Age.

The Social Stone Age (2000-2013) will be looked back on
fondly.It's the age when we discovered
social media.It's the age when we were
encouraged to share.It's the age when
we naively assumed that private actually meant private, and that big brother
didn't really exist - or at least if they did, they were only watching the bad
guys.It's the age when we weren't
having discussions about metadata.

That age is over.2014 is the start of the Social Bronze Age.This age is marked by two distinct phase
changes in the way that we communicate on the Internet.

The first phase change is that we are moving from a
default unencrypted Internet, where we only encrypt that information that we
consider to be sensitive, to a default encrypted Internet, where we encrypt
everything all the time.Facebook and
Twitter moved from only encrypting logins, to encrypting everything.Google started encrypting all searches.This would have happened eventually, but it
has really been forced this year by the realisation that the threat model has
fundamentally changed.We are no longer
trying to protect ourselves just from cybercriminals, but also from the
security services that are recording everything all the time.

The second phase change is that we have moved to a
default "in" position for social media.It is now assumed that everyone has at least
one social media account, and that the only people who don’t have one have
consciously chosen not to, and they are just a little odd.Private mailing lists have almost entirely
gone, replaced by social media groups.Moreover social media is replacing e-mail as the normal way that people
communicate with each other.

My calculations show that the Social Age is running 2.5x
faster than the IT Age, and 500x faster than civilisation!It's hardly surprising that we really aren't
coping that well.If this trend
continues, then here are my predicted dates for the remainder of the Social
Age, and some key expectations.

2018: Social Iron Age.The end of centrally controlled social media, and the end of companies
like Facebook and Twitter.Social media
will be peer-to-peer with all the processing, privacy and communication controlled
by the users and happening in an app on their phones.The Internet of things will be real and it
will all be IPv6.

2021: Social Middle Age.The end of e-mail and text based communication.Everything will be voice controlled, and
keyboards will seem quaint.Real-time
language transcription and translation will be practical for everyday use.Language will no longer be a barrier to
communication.

2023: Social Industrial Age.Avatars will do most of the work for
you.Expect the first real cyber world
war.What we see as science fiction
today, will be practical reality, except that we still won't have artificial
intelligence, robots or flying cars.